Designing a flexible, multipurpose remote lab for the IT curriculum

Abstract

A key inhibitor to effective distance education in Information Technology is providing a "hands on" laboratory experience that allows students to acquire the application and problem solving skills expected of IT graduates. While there are instances of universities developing and deploying remote labs where students are able to perform labs through the Internet using "virtual machines" and other technologies, many have found the complexity and time required to maintain labs problematic and therefore prohibitive. This paper analyzes current trends in remote lab design and explores a design that intends to increase utilization between courses, lower costs, ease management, and reduce the time needed to implement remote labs.

Security in Tele-Lab — Protecting an online virtual lab for security training

“…Those connections are proxied using a free implementation of the NX server 9 . The NX server forwards incoming connections to the respective assigned virtual machine accessing the Qemu framebuffer device via VNC (Virtual Network Computing).…”

“…Team templates are models for connecting VMs in order to perform certain exercises. 9 freeNX, see http://freenx.berlios.de Administration Interface The Tele-Lab server comes with a sophisticated web-based administration interface that is also implemented as Grails application (not depicted in Figure 1). On the one hand, this interface is made for content management in the web-based training environment and for user management.…”

Teaching a networking class for freshmen

“…A recent work [4] faced similar challenges and designed a course of Computer Forensics for first-year students. There is a more extensive literature on the lab design of a networking class (e.g., [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]). The proposed lab design is either general for supporting multiple networking classes (e.g., [6,7,8,13]) or dedicated to a particular class (e.g., [9,10] for wireless networking, and [17] for security auditing).…”

Building Reusable Remote Labs with Adaptable Client User-Interfaces

“…In this section, we will mainly discuss those papers aimed at developing remote laboratories with modern software engineering characteristics such as software reusability and modular design. Rigby et al [4] performed an analysis of current trends in remote labs to find out the best design philosophy, which increases utilization between courses, decreases costs, simplifies management, and reduces the time needed to implement remote labs. Another comparative study of remote lab engineering analyzes, compares and evaluates different implementation models, as well as discusses the services provided by each model as well [5] .…”